The RFK Jr. Tapes

The Democratic presidential candidate and America’s most prominent ‘conspiracy theorist’ talks about his family, the military-pharmaceutical complex, and our new system of social control

first met Bobby Kennedy Jr. when he showed up one summer afternoon in 1976 at the door of my ordinary suburban home in the company of a friend from Harvard named Peter Shapiro, who was running for a seat in the New Jersey State Assembly. I was 9 years old, and not particularly thrilled about our family’s recent move from Brooklyn to a street of empty suburban lawns whose nearest point of interest was a candy store a mile or so down a steep hill. The two polite, handsome young men in navy blazers, both in their 20s and well over 6 feet tall, promised a whiff of something different.

I don’t recall if I had any idea that the young Bobby Kennedy’s uncle had been president, or that his father had run for president; as a first-generation American, I knew that important people went to Harvard, and being a Kennedy was like being a movie star. The two young men on my doorstep, politely asking if my parents were home, immediately appealed to my i”magination as connections to a world that I hadn’t seen before, but which might be fun. So I gladly took them to Tory Corners, the Irish working-class district nearby, and spent the rest of the afternoon handing out buttons and leaflets for the Shapiro for Assembly campaign.

Peter won that race, and a year later, at the age of 26, he ran for the newly created job of Essex County Executive, and he won that race too, becoming something of a rising figure in national Democratic politics—a future Jewish president, even. In 1984, he won the Democratic nomination for governor before losing in a landslide to the popular Republican incumbent Tom Kean, effectively ending his political career. In between, though, I became something of an in-house mascot—the joke being that I was the only person involved in Peter’s campaigns who was younger than the candidate.

For his part, Peter graciously embraced his role as my patron, offering me summer jobs in the County Executive’s office, writing me a letter of recommendation to his alma mater, and hooking me up with a job in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s office in Washington. The highlight of my employment there was the week I spent with my friend RJ, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts, scrubbing the senator’s house in McLean, Virginia, from top to bottom—in preparation for what turned out to be a party celebrating the 20th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy Library. The guest list for the event consisted of the extended Kennedy family, including the late president’s widow, who was remarkably friendly and kind; a few of the senator’s drinking buddies, including Sens. John Tunney and Chris Dodd; House Speaker Tip O’Neill; President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy; and me and RJ. Having acquainted ourselves with the lay of the land, RJ and I then returned to the senator’s house late one night with two fellow interns and some bottles of Andre sparkling wine and got drunk in his hot tub, an act that the senator would have no doubt got a kick out of. When I call myself a Kennedy Democrat, those are among my reasons.

Robert Kennedy Jr. demonstrates during the ‘Fire Drill Friday’ climate change protest in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 15, 2019 Robert Kennedy Jr. demonstrates during the ‘Fire Drill Friday’ climate change protest in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 15, 2019 John Lamparski/Getty Images Family patronage and largesse are not what people generally celebrate as the strengths of American democracy these days, though I would venture that the current emphasis on tribal warfare and jailing one’s political foes is in fact an inferior model. I would also suggest that it is an empirical fact that far more significant legislation of far more benefit to poor and working people passed the U.S. Congress in the 1970s and even the 1980s than is ever proposed, let alone passed into law, by the tribunes of TikTok and Fox News. Before it was transformed into an instrument of billionaire oligarchs and their nonprofit bureaucracies and the American security state, the Democratic Party proved itself capable of delivering tangible benefits to tens of millions of ordinary Americans in the places where they lived—whether that meant urban church parishes or the Ozarks. Once upon a time, the Democratic Party aimed to make the lives of ordinary people better, by working through the institutions that they built and valued, rather than subjecting them to tedious lectures about right-think and using the government as an instrument to punish anyone who said the wrong words the wrong way. The party’s message was that everyone could find a welcoming place under its roof, and have their foundational beliefs honored and respected—the job of the Kennedy family being to sprinkle some handfuls of fairy dust over the whole affair. It was a job that the family took seriously for decades, sending their children to spend summers in Africa or Appalachia, or helping out with the Special Olympics, and other good works, while helping eager outsiders get a foot up on the ladder.

Everyone knows how the story ended, of course. First JFK and RFK were assassinated. Then, Teddy drove off a bridge in Martha’s Vineyard, killing a young staffer. His failed presidential run against Jimmy Carter in 1980 felt like an obligatory coda to the end of Camelot, before he continued on to a distinguished career in the Senate. Various third-generation Kennedys came and went from Congress and various statehouses. In the 1990s, John Kennedy, the former president’s olive-skinned, extraordinarily handsome, and personable son, briefly captured the country’s imagination, before dying with his very blond, very thin wife in a tragic plane crash.

Today, there are dozens of Kennedys with Ivy League degrees, quite a few of whom have had perfectly acceptable and even laudable careers at the middle rungs of the American governmental and corporate and nonprofit bureaucracies. As the family legacy faded, the torch was picked up by others. Bill Clinton presented himself as a wonky hillbilly successor to the Kennedys, inspired by his youthful encounter with JFK to pursue a life of public service, while selling out the American working class to the globalist gods. Barack Obama bought an enormous mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, but otherwise displayed little interest in the Kennedys and their mythos. Obama’s political chi came from his cool mastery of the politics of race and empire and his disdain for the American working poor, whom he redefined as white bitter-enders who clung to religion and guns. So much for the Kennedy family and the 20th-century Democratic Party.

With one exception. Anyone who hung around Kennedy political circles knew that in the collective opinion of the various longtime family friends, and speechwriters, and political consultants, and other hangers-on, who in one way or another saw themselves as custodians of the family brand, there was one member of the third generation of Kennedys who was said to have “it”—the family’s electric brand of political magic. Not Joe, the eldest of RFK’s children, who was dull and plodding; not Kathleen, a dedicated public servant who lacked personal charisma; not Caroline, who took after her mother; not John-John, who was a playboy; not Teddy Jr., who battled cancer and lost a leg; or Patrick, who was honest and sweet-natured but inherited his father’s problems with substance abuse and spoken language.

The heir to the family’s political mantle in the third generation of Kennedys was always Bobby. It was Bobby who became the leader of his tribe of orphaned brothers and sisters after their father’s death, trying and failing to make up for the absence of a charismatic father and the near-total absence of adult supervision. A friend who was close to the family in those years recalls visits to their home in Hickory Hill, Virginia, as like visiting a zoo—quite literally, with live sea mammals in the swimming pool, and animals of all shapes and sizes, frequently untamed, roaming freely throughout the house. Bobby’s hawks nested in the eaves and children climbed in and out of windows. Eventually, the friend’s mother forbade further visits, on account of it being too physically dangerous.

If the Kennedys were a kind of American royalty, then Bobby was their Prince Hal—charismatic and beloved, yet also dangerous and frequently out of control, a fatherless child who was trying to emulate the adult father figures who had been taken from him before he could truly understand who they were or what their brand of world-shaping masculinity meant. In 1983, Bobby was found nodding off in an airplane bathroom, and then pleaded guilty to heroin possession. The death of his brother David, who worshipped Bobby, a year later from a heroin overdose, made an uphill climb back to respectability seem even more unlikely, even after he got clean, and his decades of hard work as an environmental lawyer for Riverkeeper and the NRDC established him as one of the most effective environmental activists in the country.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Bobby kept his name alive in political circles through a familiar striptease dance with the New York press, which was no doubt orchestrated in part by his best friend from college, Peter Kaplan, the sharp-eyed editor of The New York Observer: A dutiful accounting of his environmental good works ridding New York’s waterways of deadly toxins, a dash of Kennedy fairy dust, a tour of his falcons—falconry being a lifelong hobby, pursued with characteristic dedication—and a tantalizing hint of a possible future race for some political office that would re-up his star power and help promote his advocacy. Of course, he never ran—which prevented the publication of the inevitable attack articles ripping him to pieces. Running would have been messy. His sister Kerry was married to the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo—heir to another political dynasty whose name meant more in New York state than the name Kennedy did.

Then it all came apart. In 2005, Kerry and Andrew Cuomo divorced. In 2010, Bobby separated from his wife, Mary Richardson, who had been Kerry’s college roommate at Brown and appeared to be suffering from substance abuse issues; a judge awarded temporary full custody of their four children to Bobby. In 2012, Mary Richardson hung herself. In 2013, Peter Kaplan died of cancer.

Meanwhile, Bobby Kennedy Jr. found success as an environmentally friendly venture capitalist along with a new cause: vaccines. In 2005, Kennedy wrote a blockbuster Rolling Stone magazine article titled “Deadly Immunity,” which presented compelling evidence of an ongoing vaccine safety cover-up led by U.S. national health bureaucrats, including transcripts of a 2000 CDC conference in Norcross, Georgia, where researchers presented information linking the mercury compound thimerosol with neurological problems in children. At its root, the case Kennedy made in his article was no more or less plausible and empirically grounded than the cases that he and dozens of other environmental advocates had been making for decades against large chemical companies for spewing toxins into America’s air, water, and soil, and then lying about it.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, wave to supporters on stage after announcing his candidacy for president in Boston on April 19, 2023 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, wave to supporters on stage after announcing his candidacy for president in Boston on April 19, 2023Scott Eisen/Getty Images Yet the resulting journalistic-bureaucratic firestorm proved that vaccines were different. It also offered a preview of the COVID wars, with pressure campaigns by vaccine believers attacking five fact-checking errors in the article—a number that was hardly unusual for a long and complex reported article in a venue like Rolling Stone. The campaigns led to various emendations of the article by its online publisher, Salon, which eventually retracted the article in 2011. In that year, Kennedy founded the World Mercury Project, which would be renamed the Children’s Health Defense, to keep pressing his assertions about empirical links between vaccinations and the explosion of neurological issues in children. For anyone who knew Kennedy, his family, and his own record as an environmental advocate, the fact that he would sink his teeth in rather than let go was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

And so began the strangest and in many ways also the most promising chapter of Bobby Kennedy’s life. Stripped of the protection that the Kennedy name had once offered him, he was no longer the future secretary of something in some future Democratic presidential administration; he was a leper, banned from social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, repeatedly attacked by network television personalities and by members of his own family as an “embarrassment” and a “moron.” Meanwhile, his book attacking Anthony Fauci, the high priest of the COVID order, became an Amazon bestseller.

It is therefore easy to welcome the news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an heir to the political dynasty that sprinkled fairy dust on the 20th-century Democratic Party, is running for president. The collision he’s about to cause between the world of official group-think and the world of normal-speak—where most Americans weigh what might be best for themselves and their children—can only be good for American democracy, and for the American language.

It doesn’t take an alarmist to recognize how fast and far the term “conspiracy theory” has morphed from the way it was generally used even a decade ago. Once a description of a particular kind of recognizably insulated and cyclical counterlogic, “conspiracy theory” has become a flashing red light that is used to identify and suppress truths that powerful people find inconvenient. Whereas yesterday’s conspiracy theories involved feverish ruminations on secret cells of Freemasons, Catholics or Jews who communicated with their elders in Rome or Jerusalem through secret tunnel networks or codes, today’s conspiracy theories include whatever evidence-based realities threaten America’s flourishing networks of administrative state bureaucrats, credentialed propagandists, oligarchs, and spies.

Whenever a hole appears in the ozone layer of received opinion, it is sure to be quickly labeled a “conspiracy theory” by a large technology platform. The lab leak in Wuhan was a conspiracy theory, as was the idea that the U.S. government was funding gain-of-function research; the idea that the development of mRNA vaccines was part of a Pentagon biowarfare effort from which Bill Gates boasted of making billions of dollars; the idea that masking schoolchildren had zero effect on the transmission of COVID; the idea that the FBI and the White House were directly censoring Twitter, Google, and Facebook; the idea that the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop showing that he received multi-million-dollar payoffs from agents of foreign powers including China and Russia was real. The most offensive thing about these falsehoods is not the fact that they later turned out to be supported by evidence, which can happen to even the most unlikely seeming hypothesis. Rather, it is that the people who labeled them “false” often knew full well from the beginning that they were true, and were seeking to avoid the consequences; that is how a truth becomes a “conspiracy theory.”

At this point, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy is the country’s leading “conspiracy theorist” alone qualifies him to be president. He is privileged, or cursed, to understand the landscape of American conspiracy theories, real and imagined, from the inside, in the way that even our greatest novelists have failed to do.

America’s last great generation of fiction writers were divided on the subject of conspiracy theories into three well-defined camps. The first camp, consisting of Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo and their fellows, accepted an American reality defined by pop psychology, celebrity, and the power of individual narcissism—i.e., a somewhat more sophisticated version of the official American narratives presented on the nightly news and in Time magazine—with writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison doing their part by filling in the endlessly fascinating subject of race. It was no accident that both Mailer and DeLillo were driven to write endlessly long, fictionalized biographies of Lee Harvey Oswald that concluded that Oswald acted alone, while neither Morrison nor Walker displayed the slightest interest in who shot Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. For his part, Roth wrote two overtly political American novels, which concluded respectively that Richard Nixon was bad and that Charles Lindbergh was an antisemite. For all of these writers, the official version of American history was the necessary overarching framework for social, familial, and individual microhistories—though in his more overtly Jewish books, like The Counterlife, The Ghost Writer and Operation Shylock, Roth managed to escape the official version of Jewish history and became a much more interesting writer.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Larry David attend the 2016 Deer Valley Celebrity Skifest in Park City, Utah, on Dec. 3, 2016 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Larry David attend the 2016 Deer Valley Celebrity Skifest in Park City, Utah, on Dec. 3, 2016 Emma McIntyre/Getty Image The second camp of American novelists were those who saw strange shapes moving beneath the murk. These included Thomas Pynchon, of course, but also William Gaddis; realists like Robert Stone and James Ellroy; and Ralph Ellison, the author of the single greatest 20th-century American novel, Invisible Man, a book which absorbed the literary energy of his great predecessor, William Faulkner, who as a Southerner necessarily dissented from the official version of everything. On one level or another, for all of these writers, the conspiracies were real, and the official version was a lie for squares. The third camp, the absurdists, who included Joseph Heller, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Barry Hannah, and others, tried and in most cases failed to break the deadlock through deadpan comedy.

RFK Jr. has been, by degrees, a James Ellroy character, a Robert Stone character, a William Gaddis character, a Thomas Pynchon character, and perhaps now, a Ralph Ellison character, in that it may be fundamentally impossible for any American to see him straight. But it is very clear to which fictional camp his character belongs. He believes that conspiracy theories are not only real but define American reality. He grew up believing that the CIA most likely assassinated his uncle Jack, and lately, he has come to believe that it also assassinated his father. To walk through American life for the past 50 years believing that the government killed the Kennedys was to be fundamentally at odds with the gestalt; to believe in these conspiracy theories while also being a Kennedy must have been even stranger, to the point of making it impossible to be entirely authentic in public. Now that conspiracy theories have gone mainstream, who better than RFK Jr. to authentically understand and communicate with a public that is rightly suspicious of the poisons in its water and air, the dishonesty of the public health bureaucracy, and the toxic nature of official discourse.

At the age of 69, the latest Kennedy to run for president is a vigorous outdoorsman who looks at least 15 years younger than his calendar age. Reporters at his announcement last week were quick to notice the preponderance of swooning MILFs in the audience; projecting the kind of masculine charisma that is impossible to find on either side of the political aisle these days, Kennedy exudes the rude physical health of an older male supplement model. The contrast with the geriatric president and his denatured courtiers, or the paunchy, cheeseburger-addicted ex-president, could not be greater.

The idea of a Kennedy leading a Jacquerie against the new authoritarianism of the best and the brightest may seem odd, or it may seem like a fitting last hurrah for the 20th-century Democratic Party, whose postwar incarnation become more or less synonymous with the Kennedys. It is too early to say whether his challenge to the unpopular Biden will turn out to be a mirage, or whether Kennedy—who after all these years has never held elective office at any level of government—is truly interested in becoming president. Still, this is a very much an era of black swans, and much stranger things, and worse things, have happened in America recently, by contrast with which the news of a Kennedy running for president seems quite normal.

I met up with Bobby Kennedy Jr. in the backyard of his house in Santa Monica recently for a talk that lasted for the better part of five hours. What follows are some edited excerpts from that conversation.

Just such a long history of rational thought and stances on the issues - who wouldn’t want him in charge of policy?

RFK Jr praised China’s ‘organ harvesting’ threats to meet climate goals https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4236805/posts

RFK, Jr.: Climate Skeptics ‘Should Be at the Hague with All the Other War Criminals’ https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3206882/posts

RFK, Jr. wants me jailed … as a war criminal https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3211190/posts

RFK Jr.: Hog farmers bigger threat than Osama https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2178592/posts

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Wants To Jail His Political Opponents https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3206573/posts

Lessons in civility from RFK, Jr. https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3509601/posts

Robert Kennedy Jr. Blames Reagan For 9/11 [for rolling back CAFE standards in 1986] https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1855875/posts

RFK Jr. spreads blame for environmental woes in New Bedford speech https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1913559/posts

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Blames Fairness Doctrine Abolishment for Conservatism Popularity https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2479527/posts

RFK, Jr: ‘We have so much to learn from Cuba’ https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3243628/posts

RFK Endorses AOC’s Green New Deal, Calls for Climate Taxation https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4187998/posts

Watch RFK, Jr. lose it at climate change march when confronted about his hypocrisy https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3206578/posts

Andrea Mitchell Applauds RFK Jr.’s ‘Impassioned Plea’ for Obama to Stop Keystone Pipeline by Fiat https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3120692/posts

RFK Jr. Slams “Right-Wing Control of American Media” https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2967445/posts

RFK Jr: Right-Wing Controls American Media, Fox News Has Divided US to a Point not Seen Since Civil War https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2967311/posts

RFK jr: Sen. Inhofe is a “Call Girl” for Big Oil (But it’s OK to say it, he’s a Democrat after all) https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2855976/posts

Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s ‘Green’ Company Scored $1.4 Billion Taxpayer Bailout https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2808401/posts

RFK Jr. Claims Air America Was More Popular Than Conservative Radio https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2740193/posts

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Endorses Charlie Crist, Attacks Tea Party (Video) https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2606809/posts

RFK, Jr. 15 months ago: Global warming means no snow or cold in DC https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2446226/posts

Robert Kennedy Jr.: right-wing hosts spread hate https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2271218/posts

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: Innocent ACORN Defrauded by ACORN Workers https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2109548/posts

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: ‘There Is No Liberal Media’(video barf!) https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2021728/posts

Kennedy Calls Skeptical Politicians ‘Traitors’ and ‘Corporate Toadies’ https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1864440/posts

RFK Jr. Says AGW Skeptics Should Be Silenced https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1864945/posts

Video: Stossel Takes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On For Traitor Remark https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1864510/posts

RFK Jr. Calls Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck Lying ‘Flat Earthers’ https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1863207/posts

RFK (Robberbaron F. Kennedy) Jr. vs. Mike Gallagher on Energy Independence https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2033812/posts

The Incredible Shrinking Credibility of RFK, Jr. https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1644744/posts

RFK Jr.: Bush, Barbour to Blame for Katrina https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1473838/posts

RFK Jr: You know, my uncle was also shot amid a climate of right-wing hate https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2655920/posts

Flashback - Palin’s Big Oil infatuation [End of snow forever in DC] https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3387273/posts

RFK Jr says Donald Trump has ‘discredited the American experiment’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7903551/Robert-Kennedy-Jr-says-Donald-Trump-discredited-American-experiment.html

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